Scot’s Newsletter Blog

The decision is in. After a year and a half of testing, and with the help of more than a thousand Scot’s Newsletter readers who’ve written detailed descriptions of their software firewall experiences, I’m happy to announce that Tall Emu’s Online Armor 2.1 is The Scot’s Newsletter Blog Best Firewall Software of 2008.

There are many reasons why I’ve selected Online Armor (OA) as the best software firewall for Windows users; the rest of this story delivers the details. But boiled down to a single thought, the most important reason is this: Online Armor offers the best blend of a high degree of protection with a high level of usability.

That may sound simplistic, but in this software category such a balance is the toughest thing for a software development company to achieve. It’s very easy to throw up a blizzard of pop-up user-prompts. You can make your system so secure that you’ll never want to use it again. It’s also easy to dumb down the security so much that you’ll rarely, if ever, see a pop up — and in the process, render the firewall ineffective. The trick is to offer solid protection with minimal user interruptions. OA 2.1 is the only firewall software I’ve tested that delivers a near-perfect balance.

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Vista SP1 has been running on a couple of my test machines for the past month and a half or so. I’ve encountered nothing remarkable in that time, other than some initial driver configuration issues. I wrote about my initial experiences last month.

Now that Vista SP1 is on its way to you, and some people may have been offered it via Windows Update, here are my recommendations:

1. You don’t need this thing right away. If you’ve kept up with Vista security patches, then you’re fine. There’s no need to rush into it.

2. On the other hand, the biggest pain you’re likely to encounter with SP1 is driver issues during or after installation. The driver problem is so acute, though, that Microsoft has taken the unusual step of preventing machines whose hardware profiles include components for which Vista SP1 doesn’t have an adequate driver from offering SP1 via Windows Update or via Automatic Updates. For more detail on this, and a specific example of the kind of driver problem you might encounter, check this Preston Gralla blog entry: My Nightmare Trying to Upgrade to Vista SP1.

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Recent issues with my current webhost, IX Webhosting, have spurred me to initiate yet another search for a new host that offers more robust MySQL support. In a nutshell, I woke up one day early this week to discover that Scot’s Newsletter Forums was down and all its MySQL database files were deleted. I filed an immediate trouble ticket to tech support. Some 26 hours after the problem with the forums began, it miraculously reappeared with all data perfectly intact. But it wasn’t for another three days that IX actually answered my trouble ticket with a vague and wimpy note lacking any real explanation.

All in all, my IX experience has been much better than that with my last webhost, Invision Power Services (IPS), the company that makes Invision Power Board, the software that powers Scot’s Newsletter Forums. IPS was the worst webhost I’ve ever used. Other hosts I’ve used in past have included Hostway.net (reliable, surly tech support, not a great value) and SectorLink (bad reliability and support but I stopped using its services almost 5 years ago).

I have very specific needs, all of which need to be met, for me to move to any new webhost. They include:

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